Chess in school
In 2016, Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet reviewed 24 studies of chess in school, with more than 5,000 children. On average, the chess children did slightly better in math and reading. But none of the studies was ideally designed, and almost none had a control group doing some other activity instead. So the effect may be overestimated, the researchers wrote.
The following year they showed that the better designed a study was, the smaller the effect. In the only study with such a control group, it was very small.
A large study was done in England. There, 100 schools and more than 4,000 pupils aged 9 and 10 had 30 hours of chess lessons. A year later, there was no difference in math, science, or reading compared with other pupils. Half the pupils liked the lessons a lot.
Older people and dementia
Several studies have followed older people for many years.
| Study | Who | What they found |
|---|---|---|
| United States, 2003 | 469 people over 75, for about five years | reading, board games, playing a musical instrument, and dancing went with a lower risk of dementia |
| France, 2013 | 3,675 people, for 20 years | 15 percent lower risk among board game players, but the difference disappeared when the researchers took into account how the participants were doing and thinking at the start |
| Australia, 2023 | 10,318 people aged 70 or older | activities such as crosswords, cards, games, and chess went with a 9 percent lower risk; the researchers couldn't rule out that it was the other way around |
The other way around means that someone whose memory is starting to slip may stop playing, rather than the playing being what protects. A 2019 review of the research on chess and dementia concluded that the evidence isn't strong enough to say that chess is the cause. The researchers behind the 2003 study wrote themselves that controlled trials are needed.
So what do we know?
Chess players do better on tests of thinking ability than others, on average. But that may be because people who find such things easy are more likely to take up chess, Sala and Gobet point out.
The safest thing to say is that playing chess makes you better at chess. And that it's fun, if you enjoy it. Try it: play a game or take the first lesson.
Sources
- G. Sala and F. Gobet: Do the benefits of chess instruction transfer to academic and cognitive skills? A meta-analysis, Educational Research Review 18 (2016)
- G. Sala and F. Gobet: Does far transfer exist? Negative evidence from chess, music, and working memory training, Current Directions in Psychological Science 26 (2017)
- J. Jerrim et al.: Chess in Schools, Education Endowment Foundation (2016); the same authors in the Journal of Human Resources 53 (2018), the abstract
- J. Verghese et al.: Leisure activities and the risk of dementia in the elderly, New England Journal of Medicine 348 (2003), the abstract
- J.-F. Dartigues et al.: Playing board games, cognitive decline and dementia, BMJ Open 3 (2013), the abstract
- Z. Wu et al.: Lifestyle enrichment in later life and its association with dementia risk, JAMA Network Open 6 (2023)
- M. Lillo-Crespo et al.: Chess practice as a protective factor in dementia, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16 (2019)
The facts on this page come from the sources above and, where possible, were checked across several sources. Where the sources disagree, we say less or say what each one says. A number that is an estimate says whose it is, and a counted number comes with its date.
Updated November 14, 2026